Congress should watch as competition bears sweet fruit. What Republican will dare to enact measures stifling broadband development then?

Are you kidding me?! Of course they will as soon as they get their bribe (excuse me-campaign contribution) check then the name calling and other attacks will flood the airwaves and this attack on the people not getting what they deserve will commence.

Just had to get that out there.

Seriously, competition is good and either party is a bad thing for said competition.

Congress should watch as competition bears sweet fruit. What Republican will dare to enact measures stifling broadband development then?

Grande is hardly a champion of competition, as anyone who has been forced to use their service thanks to exclusive agreements with apartment complexes can tell you.

My grandparents used to live in an elderly restricted neighborhood. It's a neighborhood like any other suburban neighborhood except you have to be 65+ to buy property there. Grande had an exclusive contract with the neighborhood also.

For ten years Google has been working in a world where one of the largest companies on Earth was fighting to "cut off their air supply." That is what I see this as, and I'm sure they'll be OK.

It will be interesting to see how long the cable companies manage to convince customers in Los Angeles and NYC that gigabit broadband isn't affordable there when they leap so quickly to provide it to much smaller places like this for so little.

Are all these companies each going to run separate fiber to each terminal? If so, what a waste. In a sane world, we'd run a single fiber, then let providers compete to lease the connection.

Not true. I would probably subscribe to both, just for redundancy when I am working from home. I would definitely do so at the office. If you have a single fiber, you can have one or the other, not both. (One line cut takes them both down.)

I think people would prefer the government to run the fiber with the intention of sharing it so that there's no bait and switch.

That's basically how fibre is being rolled out here in NZ - Crown Fibre contracts to infrastructure companies to wire out different areas of the country, and ISP's lease the fibre to provide service to their customers. The infrastructure companies aren't allowed to have a retail arm so they've got no incentive to favour one ISP over another.

Congress should watch as competition bears sweet fruit. What Republican will dare to enact measures stifling broadband development then?

I'm getting quite confused over the churning of politics in the US. Looking back 15-20 years, your average Republican, both politician and declared voter would have been fully in favour of competition, while the Democrats would have been in favour of managed monopolies/oligopolies.

Where have all the centre right Republicans gone? Now it seems they're all limited issue campaigners: tea-partiers, extreme religious right, gun lobby. Has the huge majority of the traditional Republican electorate just been summarily disenfranchised by this lurch to the extreme of the political spectrum? Or have they been carried along with it, and now there is a vacuum where there is actually nobody still existant in the traditional centre right?

It's actually pretty awesome. And they put in a high powered Netgear wireless router that killed the distance and connection of my previous off the shelf Netgear router.

The speeds fluctuate right now. During the day they are usually around 300 - 400. At night they are usually in the 700's. But Grande assures me that's only bc they are doing lot's of installs and testing with a lot of traffic that can slow it down and it will be above 700 - 800 all the time soon.

I was going to wait for Google Fiber, but considering the time it has taken for them to install Kansas City, I didn't want to hold my breath.

Here is my Austin, TX AT&T U-verse, fiber optic Internet service speed test. AT&T plans to offer gigabit service in 2014. Grande doesn't support my area (I live in central Austin). I'll probably upgrade this year as I could use a little more speed. BTW, even though local, in-house wireless is rarely a bottleneck or issue, my laptop is using a wired Ethernet connection for this test, even though I almost always use wireless.

Are all these companies each going to run separate fiber to each terminal? If so, what a waste. In a sane world, we'd run a single fiber, then let providers compete to lease the connection.

I can't speak for Grande, or whatever TWC may have in the works, but AT&T has been running fiber in Austin for new neighborhood build outs for over half a decade. So even in not-so-nice but relatively new neighborhoods, the Gigapower tier is already available. It's currently capped at 300/300 with the 'bump' to gigabit coming in June. And awesome as the service is, it still makes you want to punch someone from AT&T in the face since they could have offered this in a bunch of neighborhoods years ago. It was only the imminent threat from Google siphoning off subscribers and their sweet recurring revenue that made them suddenly concerned about our bandwidth (most Uverse users were dealing with 24Mb/s or less).

Grande only has a tiny footprint in Austin, but the more the merrier (and this would be tits for college kids down in San Marcos where they have a large presence if they've got the infrastructure for it down there).

It's actually pretty awesome. And they put in a high powered Netgear wireless router that killed the distance and connection of my previous off the shelf Netgear router.

The speeds fluctuate right now. During the day they are usually around 300 - 400. At night they are usually in the 700's. But Grande assures me that's only bc they are doing lot's of installs and testing with a lot of traffic that can slow it down and it will be above 700 - 800 all the time soon.

I was going to wait for Google Fiber, but considering the time it has taken for them to install Kansas City, I didn't want to hold my breath.

Nice! AT&T is capped at 300/300 until June. This was the best I managed last month when I was playing around with different speedtest servers nearby.

HELLO?!? ANYBODY?!? We've got money and AT&T is no competition! Please come give us fast internet access so we can throw this money at you. Please?

I really hate these articles as all I can do is drool and dream. You damned Austinites are lucky to have actually competition over there.

I'd love to see stats on coverage for all of the gigabit services in Austin a year from now. While this article makes it sound a bit like a bandwidth utopia, most people here are in the same boat as the rest of the country. TWC is literally the only choice for many, with U-verse being another option for some. But unless you live in a neighborhood that was wired for fiber by AT&T when it was built, you shouldn't be hoping for the Gigapower tier anytime soon. That leaves most people paying almost the same for more pedestrian offerings in the ~20Mb/s to ~50Mb/s range.

Good luck getting anyone to run anything if they're forced to share it with their competitors afterwards.

That bait and switch usually only works after the fact.

I think people would prefer the government to run the fiber with the intention of sharing it so that there's no bait and switch.

Yeap. In fact I think Google cares little about who provides that affordable 1 gigabit/sec connection. They would rather focus on services built *on* gigabit connections. So little by little they are winning. Wonder what city they go to next.

What's absurd is that there are a bunch of different companies laying fibre. The government in the US desperately needs to step in and treat fibre as it is - essential infrastructure. Heavily regulate whoever owns the fibre and force them to offer the same wholesale pricing to whichever ISPs want to offer a service over that fibre.